In this paper we present the use of Constraint Programming for solving balanced academic curriculum problems. We discuss the important role that heuristics play when solving a problem using a constraint-based approach. We also show how constraint solving techniques allow to very efficiently solve combinatorial optimization problems that are too hard for integer programming techniques.

Evaluation of the Academic Preparedness and Final Performance of Students of Electro-Techniques Field in Technical and Vocational Schools A.A. Khallaaghi, Ph.D. E. Ghaasemi Pooyaa, Ph.D. To determine the extent of the electro-techniques students' preparedness in order to assess their success in learning the practical skills and attitudes prescribed by the curriculum, a cluster sam...

OBJECTIVE To compare the academic performance of students who entered family medicine residency programs with that of students who entered other disciplines and discern whether or not family physicians are as academically talented as their colleagues in other specialties. DESIGN Retrospective quantitative study. SETTING University of Calgary in Alberta. PARTICIPANTS Three graduating class...

There is increasing interest in integrating population health and informatics topics into the undergraduate medical curriculum, yet little consensus exists on the most effective approach to accomplish this. We introduced the use of an academic data warehouse of encrypted patient information into an existing 2nd year medical school course. Exercises were developed requiring students to retrieve ...

OBJECTIVE The United States is facing a severe shortage of academic child and adolescent psychiatrists. This article reviews a model integrated pathway to improve recruitment. METHODS The authors review training portals for research in child and adolescent psychiatry. There is a summary of a focus group discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the Integrated Research Pathway in Child...

The Balanced Academic Curriculum Problem (BACP) has received little attention in Constraint Programming. Only a few articles deals with this problem with experimental results on the three small instances publicly available in CSPLIB. The present article describes an approach to efficiently solve this challenging problem. Optimal solutions are produced on a variety of randomly generated instance...

Hardware support for high-performance computing (HPC) has so far been subject to significant advances. The pervasiveness of HPC systems, mainly made up with parallel computing units, makes it crucial to spread and vivify effective HPC curricula. Besides didactic considerations, it appears very important to implement HPC hardware infrastructures that will serves for practices, and also for scien...

Empowerment of faculty is essential for academic success. The Junior Faculty Development Program (JFDP), sponsored by the Office of Professional Development of the Penn State College of Medicine, was established in 2003 with the goal of promoting the development and advancement of junior faculty so they can achieve success in their academic careers. The program consists of two components: a cur...